Two memories
by apelle
Summary: When my mother visited me some time ago we spent a lot of time putting order in her memories from her childhood as a refugee after the WW II. These are two of them I captured on paper


Two Memories

1950

They say there are three-dimensional components to human consciousness. We are born and grow old with them .I am old as I weave my past but young as it all comes back to life.

I do not know about others, but when I think of my childhood I immediately feel the need to hold my head in my hands, maybe suspending this way the heavy weight of so many memories. Not only old people think the past is everything and not only young people believe in the future and nobody can live like a stubborn wild horse only in the present.

When my parents first moved in the yard we lived for ten years, they knew nobody. They had just come out of a Russian-Jewish refugee camp and were happy to be alive, ready to make friends and enjoy life after the war. It did not take too long for my mother to become friendly with the other renters. Vasea and Little Marie were the most colorful couple living right behind our two rooms. They lived in a one-bedroom space and their mere existence fueled my curiosity many times throughout my childhood, mainly because of everything that happened in their house. The liquor they shared on pay nights had fabulous powers not only on their whacky reality but also over my own everyday life keeping away the deed of being a strange child and delivering my entertainment for numerous nights.

Little Marie was not little despite her name, but a tough woman who knew how to hold her liquor though powerless under Vasea's quick fist. The following day, she would show up in the yard with a black and purple eye and insist on telling the same story every time:

"The door hit me."

One Christmas eve, Little Marie surprised my mom when she pulled out of a box a little white and blue dress and gave it to me. It was the most beautiful dress I had seen, with white and blue bows attached to its hem and a marine motif on the upper part. The minute it took me to dress up was extended into eternities of blissful happiness, twirling in front of the mirror and running up and down our stone paved yard. My mother was touched by Little Marie's gift and invited her and Vasea the day after Christmas to a neighborhood bodega hoping to return her friendly gesture.

What my mother did not know, was the effect liquor had on Little Marie. After a couple of beers, to my mother's shock and my tearful disappointment, Little Marie asked for the dress back. No explanations .I was devastated especially because I did not understand the mechanics of what seemed to be a very cruel game the grownups played.

Since I was well behaved as a child, when I did any foolish deeds I was able to be silent, say nothing, and get away with anything. After my first disappearance that Christmas eve, following the blue dress fiasco, my father found me hours later, freezing cold and talking with two skeletal, wet dogs, cuddled at my feet. He took me home where without a word fixed two hot chocolates expecting, certainly, an explanation, an answer, for me to say anything.

"Why, why did you want to run away? How could you think that this is the way?"

"Do not know," I answered, sad and without my usual smile. After half an hour, with no words about my wandering, he told me of a friend from work who had a cat and was just looking for a little girl to take care of its kittens. Taking care of the two little black and white kittens kept me entertained, away from the monotony of my life as a small and peculiar little girl

We lived in two rooms: my room and the kitchen/living room, which was also my parent's room. Many memories come back to my mind now as the warmth of our simple and frugal life finds its way back in my thoughts toying with my olfactory trance. The kitchen / bedroom smelled of plum pudding and other simple delights my mother was able to put together out of our food ration as all the war refugees had to share. Our little house with the flower garden in front seemed a corner of paradise and I always found my mother bent on something, washing or ironing or baking some little delight. I was convinced she could breathe life into things. All my childhood I drank my milk from a nice cup of porcelain with red and blue flowers. Mother's hands as she pushed the cup forward moved so slow and gracious suggesting the feeling this cup was not a simple object but an enchanted one.

The next Christmas eve after the cruel game Little Marie seemed to have played on my feeble mind, I went to bed early, one hand under my head, covering one ear such that I could still hear the dishes clinking in the kitchen as my mother was washing them, mumbling a little song as light as a sleigh pushed by the wind. All I wanted was not to be disappointed yet again and maybe see the snow falling since the year before I had missed it.

The oranges lined up on top of my dresser mom later cut and simmered their flesh until the house smelled like a magic fairy tale.

1954

For a couple of years now, almost every evening we met behind the school building and chatted or walked around our neighborhood looking at pretty houses, imagining a charming life that was impossible to find immediately after the war and only the movie heroines seemed to live.

Her name was Mira. She was my best friend when we lived in the two rooms alongside many others renters in the tenement sternly managed by Miss Iris.

I liked Mira's spirit, her abrasiveness around anything that crossed her complicated life. When she ate sunflower seeds, just as all gypsies did, I liked the way she spat the shells while smiling ironically, in the corner of her mouth. There was always a leftover shell, black and thin as a thread, against her upper lip. She had her pockets full of sunflower seeds at all times, getting her "supplies" from the old Manda, her Gypsy grandmother living on the other side of the tracks, over the "ditch" which carried dirty sewer water outside the town.

Up to the railway was the familiar world to me, the "good world", as Manda often referred to, with nice houses and apartment buildings, with long and narrow alleys and streets named after famous composers; Mozart, Chopin, Bach, Puccini ...

On the other side of the tracks was what everybody knew as "The Pit." Long and muddy streets, lined up with old and rotten fences around dilapidated houses resembling one another.

In Manda's yard, other than mud and broken-clay pots, old and rusty copper vessels with the enamel peeled, was nothing else but mud. The threshold to her hut looked dull and dirty in the sticky mud of the enclosure.

When I followed Mira to her grandmother's hut, I tripped over some old shoes and galoshes lined up like little soldiers by the front stoop. Seeing that I was embarrassed by my clumsiness Manda asked me:

"What, you do not leave your shoes at the door?"

And she answered quicker than I with a slight shrug did:

"You live in a real house, in another world, not like me stepping out directly in the mud ..."

In a corner of the room was a stove with a hot plate and a big black pot in which Manda roasted sunflower seeds. Alongside was a bed full of rags thrown over one on top of the other. The dirty hut had a bedroom and a kitchen, just like our house. On the ground, rugs were thrown in disarray .The whole room smelled of roasted seeds with salt. Their smell was so pungent, that it overcame the other smells of mold, wet earth, and dirty laundry.

While in the hut, we laughed at the way the old woman spoke and tried not to trip over some of the pots filled with rotten food scraps, placed everywhere around the room.

When we returned from Manda, with pockets full of sunflower seeds it was cold outside already, like all the evenings in November. When crossing the tracks, the place looked deserted and dark. I was afraid, but did not dare admitting it, knowing how gutsy Mira was.

Suddenly, within the darkness, the shadow of a man made its ominous presence. When passing us on the right, he lit a cigarette and in the light from the match, I started to distinguish some of the man's features. On the forehead, just above the eyebrows, he had a gash, what once seemed to have been a cut caused by a knife. He stopped next to Mira and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth.

"What, Mira, you started to walk around the better world? You ignore us now. For an intruder? A white girl? You know that talking to someone about us or what you saw will get you in trouble, right. "

Mira remained silent, it was too dark to see anybody's facial expressions so I never knew if she was afraid or not.

"He threatened you, now what will you do? " I asked Mira later when we came closer to my home.

"Do not worry," said Mira. "He did not mean it," she added, before disappearing into the darkness behind the building.

The next day, towards evening, I went to the place I knew, where we set up to meet and hang out each time. But Mira had already arrived at our place, sitting on the bench behind the school building, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the black shells back in a bush.

"Sorry," she said "but we cannot see each other anymore. Tonight is the last time we will meet. He made me choose between you and them. They threatened that if I don't choose them, I'll pay."

"Can't we see each other at least half an hour in the evening?" I asked myself, although I sensed that Mira was off unshakable determination.

"No, because we cannot be seen together. In my group you are considered an intruder, they see you as a threat to them, we cannot change anything, we live in two different worlds, and however well I would feel I cannot give up my world," said Mira before finally disappearing from my life.

A few days she was found with a knife stuck in her heart, snow reddened by her blood. Right next to the track, in that desolate place where we went together so often. She was not even 15 years old.

The following days without Mira were hard for me and her ironic smile remained frozen in my memory never replaced by anything.


End file.
